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The Saltire Blues

I don’t tend to get depressed. Or at least I haven’t gotten depressed very often in the last twenty years or so. Certainly deaths, the weather and supporting the Edmonton Oilers for the last twenty years can get a person down, but such troughs have never lasted long with me (though the Oilers loss in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals in 2006 was a monumental bummer).

This week I was depressed.

It was the 55% that got me down. The percentage of Scotland’s electorate that opted not to take a chance on change. While my gloom wasn’t as intense as a colleague who concluded that ‘Scotland is dead’, it was pretty intense. I thought I could rely on my kids to cheer me up, but they only made me think of their future, and that it wouldn’t be in an independent Scotland. All that hope that had built in the weeks leading up to the 18th transmuted into just a dead, empty feeling. I could see it in others, too. Not surprising, seeing that more Glaswegians than not had voted Yes.

I also felt angry, which in my experience can be a nasty sidekick to the blues. During the week, I heard of many people whose employers had warned them that a Yes vote might cost them their jobs. They, understandably perhaps, voted accordingly. How was that democratic, I asked myself? And of course those who felt the least secure in their jobs were probably the easiest to convince. If that happened in a general election, they’d be calling for UN observers.

The real low point, however, came early. On Friday, we went next door for a party – their daughter was heading for university in England. We were there with the kids and, after about an hour, Michelle and I decided to head to ours to put them to bed. She followed suit, but I headed back. Bad decision. I caught up with a cadre of fellow mourners (all men – it seemed as though most the women had voted no) and we drank and kvetched and kvetched and drank. All of the sudden it was early the next morning and I staggered home. I didn’t think I had drunk that much, but the hangover said otherwise. I did my best impression of a fire hydrant for the next 15 hours, making me a perfectly useful father and husband. No, it didn’t feel good.

The gloom finally lifted when I headed off to the library on Thursday to officially start my new research project on social psychiatry. Maybe it was the smell of musty old American Journal of Psychiatry volumes, maybe it was finally starting a project I’ve wanted to do for a decade, maybe it was the fact that two of my students were in the quiet part of the library with me, starting on their dissertations; whatever it was, I was smiling again. Hopeful. The next day I played a game of basketball and the other players commented on my energy. I thought it was probably that my body had been purged of damn near everything on Saturday, but perhaps it was also a fresh start of sorts.

So, if we’re starting again, where are we going? Well, having just watched some of the highlights of the Ryder Cup, I have an idea. It was amazing to see the joy on the faces of the victorious Europeans when they realised they had won. These, the most solitary and independent of sportspeople, in the most exclusive of games, usually have to celebrate solo. But the Ryder Cup gives them the chance to compete, struggle, lose and win together. When they triumph, they triumph as one. When they lose, no one is alone. And so it should be. In life as it is in the Ryder Cup. That’s why I voted Yes. And that’s the way forward.